“His Willy is so lovable,” she said in a recent interview. “He will make you laugh, he will make you feel joyous, which makes the heartbreak at the end all the more deep and all the more resonant.”
Rendering the Loman family as Black aggravates that heartbreak. As Cromwell explained it, the play remains the same, but its themes hit even harder. “The play is still, I believe, about the American dream,” she said. “When we see that through the lens of a Black family, we really see how much further away that dream is.”
Playing Willy has eluded the great Black actors of previous generations, if they dared to dream it at all. In considering the opportunity, Pierce listed off at least a dozen actors — James Earl Jones, Ossie Davis, Roscoe Lee Browne among them — whom he thinks of as his forebears, all of whom, he believes, would have made a magnificent Willy.
“I am humbled to be here now for them, to honor them, to honor their desires,” he said. “I owe it to them to step up and do my part and make a contribution to the American theater and that’s a humbling and a beautiful honor to have.”
That contribution may hit differently here than it did in London, when this distinctly American play has returned to an American stage and to America’s particular racial climate. Cromwell told me that the play felt changed already.
“Because it is closer to home,” she said. “I really feel that it’s holding a mirror to itself. It’s a great classic play being seen through a lens that it hasn’t been seen through before. And it will be surprising and dangerous in that space.”
That this lens centers a Black family has and will continue to make headlines. But Pierce brings much more than his race to Willy, and the role has brought him things in return, some of which he anticipated, some he didn’t. Willy’s mortality has made him conscious of his own. He has dreamed about death throughout the rehearsal process — his own death, those of his loved ones — and had been preoccupied with how much time he has left and if he has used his time well.
